And with that, I'm off for the week. 🫂 (Meeting nerves.)

The world is so big and so full of pain, and the hardest part of sentience is that we're *just* self-aware enough to feel frustrated by the limits of our agency in it.

We take it out on ourselves.

We take it out on others.

We try our best to act with integrity from our subject-positions--and we screw up all the same, because our subject-positions are never the full picture.

It is enough that we're still here, though--and still trying.

Today's BookTube was supposed to be up last weekend, but it got interrupted by a massive street protest--which is kind of in keeping with the theme: a reflection on the reading context for Vajra Chandrasekera's excellent THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS (with an essay by the excellent Gautam Bhatia, too!).

Westerners sometimes overlook the richness of the world outside our political contexts. In the process, we miss lessons from other active discourses today.

#SFF #Books

https://youtu.be/VWCcLN-4VvA

@th3j35t3r

Hope you've got good offline "tools" of your own, J, to offset those extra stressful days online. 🤞

May the rest of your weekend, and all the week ahead, be a hell of a lot easier on your end.

@LiseL @Novels56 @gemswinc @jenebene @Graci

Oh, that's a fun alternative! I get so cranky when some of the words I see aren't the ones they want. :)

Also, what is UP with our bodies? Is this timeline not already hard enough for the hours we usually spend conscious in it? What's wrong with these silly meat sacks of ours, that they want to spend *even more time* in the waking realm? 🤨

@tyghebright

Ooo, added to my list! Thank you for championing this work. 🤗

@Novels56 @LiseL @gemswinc @jenebene @Graci

Novels, I love your pretty rows of lightbulbs! But as someone else who also isn't getting to sleep at a decent hour these days, I hope you're doing okay. 🫂

Connections
Puzzle #322
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪

Strands #56
“Coming clean”
🔵🔵🔵🟡
🔵🔵🔵

@janallmac

Honestly, Jan, this was my first interaction of the day, and I'm very grateful for it. Thank you for your thoughtful articulation of a body of data that wasn't fitting the narrative, and your thoughts on why that might be.

I deeply appreciate your careful reflections on a difficult topic. I hope the rest of your Sunday is filled with many lighter and lovelier things, as well.

@janallmac

Oh, it's been psyops since the start of the war. I've mentioned repeatedly that in war one cannot trust any "side" to tell the full truth - because info is an important weapon in any arsenal. With Ukraine and Russia, both sides lie routinely *to the world* to protect troop movements and whip up morale / demoralize the enemy.

The problem is that few people are ready for infowars of this magnitude. They want to believe that their "side" is always right, and the other is always wrong.

@janallmac

Yes! Exactly! And that's a fantastic site of observations on which to grow media literacy. I wholeheartedly agree: legacy and some social media are whipping us into a froth disproportionate to real-world action.

I really appreciate you sharing the fruits of your personal check-ins with students you know! That's the kind of "touching grass" we could all benefit from doing more of. :)

@janallmac

Agreed. Columbia is a *very* left-wing school to begin with, so I wasn't surprised to see a giant protest there, but not all are!

And if not for other major schools reacting in defense of the right to protest after Columbia's escalation to police crackdown, it probably would have stayed that way. From local student papers, it's clear that many of the other protests' explicit aims are solidarity with Columbia students and faculty, as much as about anything directly related to war.

@janallmac

Ah, I understand what you're responding to: the media hype that's made these university protests seem larger than they are.

I agree that the media has hyped this up, and the panic cycle has been terrible and counterproductive re: de-escalation.

The hard part is that it's just one panic cycle after another. A few weeks ago, it was overwhelming fear around Iran, without legacy media providing context for those actions, either.

Corporate media is doing well, preying on our fears!

@janallmac

Again, it being limited to certain campuses makes perfect sense: some places have more they can ask their universities to do.

Put another way, if students *were* protesting everywhere, there'd still be a crowd spinning universality as its own proof of suspicious activity. These young people engaged in the time-honoured tradition of civil disobedience cannot win, whatever they do; they will always be seen as the problem. But mass protests happened around Iraq, too. This isn't new.

@janallmac

I also see a lot of folks more concerned with consequentialism, and working backwards. If this might affect Biden and the election, it *must* by psyops.

But it's an argument from incredulity not to allow for the possibility of people cogently disagreeing - on war policy involving US funding and reaping massive deaths and suffering especially! - without simply being sleeper agents.

This war is awful to watch.
The way it leads us to presume everyone not with us is against us is too.

@janallmac

What I see here is a lot of people reacting to a news cycle whipped up by Columbia university escalating rapidly to police violence (a move that infuriated Columbia profs across the spectrum, and brought them in solidarity to the protest spaces).

Solidarity protests emerged, but even they have coherent sites of local action. In Atlanta, for instance, Stop Cop City has long protested police modelling their training ground on an IDF training site, so that shapes their uni protest. /×

@janallmac

Morning Jan,

With love, it's very strange to see people to suggest it isn't "natural" for youth to protest. The kind of protest in Columbia, for instance, isn't new. When my school partnered with the UAE, Jewish students, women's groups, & LGBTQ student groups united in protest, because a UAE satellite campus wouldn't be a safe place for any of them. Didn't work! Our uni claimed the contracts were too far along. But it's a normal site of student action even outside times of war. /×

@Minholkin

Thank you, Min. That means a lot. I'll keep that in mind, and see how I'm feeling around the meeting. 🫂

If I don't see your wonderful posts this week, l just want to thank you in advance for your care and your presence with so much and so many.

It makes *such* a difference, even if the rest of us don't always articulate this as often as we should.

May you always feel deeply supported in turn. ❤️

Also:

I still haven't decided if I'll post the newsletters this week to CoSo, but if I don't, it will simply be out of respect for the *community* aspect of this space. I don't believe in just popping on to self-promote.

I know we've had a really awful week, with many folks battening down the hatches. I think I've been muted a few times, blocked once, myself?

The world outside this space is heavy with stressors, but--

We'll get through how that pain is manifesting here.

One day at a time. 💙

Okay. Patrons finally have an update, and a return to normal workflow after a couple of rough "brain" weeks there.

I've also sent off my pitch materials to one of my beta readers; I'm pretty solid on them, but another pair of eyes is always a gift.

Tomorrow, I'll post BookTube, and then I'll be off social media to steady my nerves around the difficult meeting with my agent this week. It sucks to start over, but the industry and world really suck, too.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/notes-in-advance-103180358